1. Technical Field
Embodiments discussed herein generally relate to techniques for accessing a storage device of a computer platform. More particularly, certain embodiments relate to accessing a storage device of a platform independent of a call to a host operating system of the platform to request such access.
2. Background Art
In a conventional computer platform, access control mechanisms are enforced by native file management of a host operating system (OS) on the platform. In a typical example, the host OS may receive a request from an agent of the platform to access some storage medium of the platform. In response to such a request, the host OS will refer to its file management system to determine, for example, whether an access permission indicates that the requested access is to be allowed (or denied). If an access permission is identified as allowing the requested access, the host OS will implement a driver process to access the storage device on behalf of the requesting application.
With continued advancement in various computer technologies (e.g. system management, virtualization, cloud networking, etc.) comes increasingly varied and/or complex relationships between a host OS of a computer platform and one or more agents on (or communicating with) that platform. For example, as computer platforms are asked to support increasingly complex security management operations, basic input/output system (BIOS) provisioning, cloud computing, virtualization and/or the like, such platforms face increasing performance overhead under increasingly time-sensitive performance constraints. For certain types of access to a platform storage device, the need to enforce access control mechanisms via the host OS has, to date, been considered an inherent part of such performance overhead.